What is humility?

In reply to a question, Shaykh Ahmad Dabbagh briefly answered on what is humility and how to stay clear of pride & self-admiration.

Spiritual intensive:
– Discourse notes 13/10/12

Humility is not denying your strengths and qualities but directing it to the one who have you these qualities. Second part of humility is to admit your weakness.
For example, if I have knowledge and I say I don’t, that is lying and not being humble..
To be humble is, directing your strength of having knowledge to Allah and utilising it for Allah. Not keeping it aloof from people. To share/teach knowledge is a command of Allah.

– Merely reading about humbleness will not give you humbleness.
– In Islam it is never about the ‘now’ but about how it will end.
– Don’t judge yourself based on how you are now, but how you may end. Don’t judge others on how they are ‘now’ but how they may end. Because, we should hate the sin and not the sinner.

– Attribute any good deeds to Allah and not to you. As he gave you the blessings of ‘ability and time’.
Behind the veil of everything is only Allah. So, to be unjust to creation is to be unjust to Allah. Our every dealing is with Allah and not only with creation. Creation is only a means of test between the examiner and the one being questioned. If you are bad to a person. Then why is Allah angry with you. You did not harm him? It goes to show behind the veil of creation is only Allah. Allah will say to a person on the day of judgement, ‘I was hungry and you did not feed me. I was sick and you did not visit me.’ (Paraphrased)
This Hadith qudsi is pointing to this fact. – Behind the veil of creation is Allah.

– Syyiduna yakut Arshi, student of Shaykh Abu Abbas Al Mursi. Once went to the aid of a dove who complained to him of it’s injustice at the hands of another Muslim. Imagine! Being a great man of Allah, he went to it’s help regardless and solved it’s problems. He did not look at his status or think of what will people say.

– We are only a screen on which good deeds are projected on by Allah. If he switches off the projector then where will our good deeds go? We are dead people. He gives us all the abilities and skills to do good deeds. Just like a projector screen can never claim to be displaying the images but the projector. Similarly, we too, can never claim to be the owners of our good deeds but Allah.